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Page 18 March 2001
Color Business Report
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marketing, one tends to do more of what is effective,
and one avoids what is not effective. Pilot programs are
the experiments that help marketing executives tell the
difference. A well-run experiment can help a marketing
manager make a decision with confidence. The decision,
in such cases, often is to extend the pilot effort to a
reachable population with the same characteristics. If
the costs of establishing a CRM infrastructure are too
much of a burden for a pilot program, wont the costs of
extending data collection (address and industry
confirmation in the case of this utility) to a larger group
also be burdensome? If one looks for return on
marketing investment when making a marketing
decision, linking one-to-one marketing techniques to
broader deployment of a customer relationship
management program may act as deterrent to adoption
of variable-data marketing.
Extending a pilot program to a larger population is
a traditional way of thinking about direct mail
marketing. And for the purposes of comparing results
with conventional direct mail marketing techniques, the
two programs have to be similar. But once the results
are proven and the concept of one-to-one marketing is
accepted, direct marketing can become quite
unconventional. Why not work the economics in reverse,
and stop doing mass mailings (anathema to direct mail
professionals)? Instead of extending a 1,500-piece test
to 150,000 or 1,500,000 pieces, the campaign can be
spread out over 100 days, presumably with the same
monetary return. Making direct mail a continuous
process rather than a batch process has several
advantages. For one, if updating or extending a large
database is too expensive, one can key single pieces of
outbound mail to the receipt of inbound database
updates. Since one controls inbound orders (and
telephone inquiries) by controlling outbound mail,
orders will come in at a steady rate rather than being
compressed in a single time period. In addition, with
personalized mailings, incoming orders or calls can be
directed to particular call center staffers, fostering the
dialog that is implicit with CRM.
Dialog
The concept of dialog marketing is raised in the IIW
Institutes report, with the implication that, on a
customer-by-customer basis, the fields of a multi-faceted
customer database will become populated with
information about customers. The information will be
available to all who are involved in customer contact,
and will be updated as the dialog with the customer
continues. One-to-one mailing pieces are but one
possible application of the information in a very rich
customer database. Added-value Analysis of Four-color
Digital Printing provides evidence of benefits to be
derived by using document technology in marketing,
while cautioning that achieving results requires both
long-term thinking and implementation of customer
relationship marketing techniques.
F